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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAndrew Testa | The New York TimesA fisherman sails past melting icebergs in Greenland. A new study has concluded that sea levels might rise a maximum of 27 inches by 2100 thanks to less ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica.

OSLO, Norway — The melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than
expected this century, limiting sea-level rise to a maximum of 69 centimeters, about 27 inches, an
international study said yesterday.

Even so, such a rise could dramatically change coastal environments in the lifetimes of people
born today with ever-more-severe storm surges and erosion, according to the ice2sea project by 24
mostly European scientific institutions.

Some scientific studies have projected sea levels to rise up to 2 meters (about 61/2 feet) by
2100, a figure that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a worst case that would swamp
large tracts of land from Bangladesh to Florida.

Ice2sea, a four-year project to narrow down uncertainties of how melting ice will pour water
into the oceans, found that sea levels would rise between 16.5 and 69 centimeters under a scenario
of moderate global warming this century.

“This is good news” for those who have feared sharper rises, David Vaughan, of the British
Antarctic Survey who led the ice2sea project, said in a telephone interview.

“But 69 centimeters is a very real impact … it changes the frequency of floods significantly,”
he said. And seas would keep rising for centuries beyond 2100, in a threat to coastal cities and
low-lying islands such as the Maldives or Tuvalu.

Ice2sea said a thaw of Antarctica, Greenland and glaciers from the Alps to the Andes would
contribute between 3.5 and 36.8 centimeters to sea-level rise this century. The fact that water
expands as it warms would add another 13 to 32 centimeters, Vaughan said.

Some other scientists disputed ice2sea’s projections.

“I think the numbers are too low,” said Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an ice expert and professor at the
Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. She said ice2sea wrongly assumed a slowdown in the rate of ice
discharge from Greenland.

Sea levels rose by 17 centimeters (about 61/2 inches) last century, and the rate has accelerated
to more than 3 millimeters a year. A third of the current rise is from Antarctica and Greenland —
equivalent to emptying 138 million Olympic-sized pools into the sea every year.

One factor likely to offset sea level rise, ice2sea said, is that higher temperatures will
result in more snow, especially over Antarctica, locking in the moisture on land. It also played
down worries of a runaway melt of Greenland, and of the breakup of major Antarctic ice shelves.

Governments want to know future sea levels to plan sea barriers and regulations for everything
from vacation homes to nuclear power plants by the coast. And every extra centimeter means big
costs.

The ice2sea study also said that a survey of experts’ opinions showed there was a less than
one-in-20 risk that melting ice sheets would contribute more than 84 cm to sea level rise this
century. Taken with thermal expansion, that would mean a sea level gain of just over a meter,
Vaughan said.

Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a U.N. deal, by the end of 2015, to combat global
warming that would help limit temperature rises and rising seas.